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[Blog] Total Zones in Skullforge: The Hunt

I mentioned in an earlier blog that we were originally going to make an open world game. This, of course, was scrapped as we did not have the manpower or the budget to do something on that scale. What we decided was to divide the island of Sorova into 12 zones. Each zone takes a section of the island and allows the player to run around in it. The overall size of each zone is pretty large. It takes three real minutes to walk from on end to the other end (assuming there aren’t any obstacles to be navigated around).

My original goal was to make each zone match each other directly, so if you took a snapshot of each zone and pasted them together, they’d make the whole island. It didn’t take long to realize why that was a bad idea as it would have essentially been an open world game without the seamless transition from one zone to the next. So I decided to make each zone a small section of each zone in the grid. This made things much more manageable. That doesn’t mean it’s any easier to craft a zone, because it isn’t. Each zone takes a lot of care and, to be honest, we’ve redone the first outdoor area (Hamlin (Outside)) three or four times already.

As for other zones, we’ll have:

12 outside zones
2 main cities
2 towns
6 dungeons

This doesn’t even include the various shops, taverns, homes, inns, etc. At the end of the day, there will be lots of places to visit. We’ve posted screenshots from one of the main cities (Hamlin), one of the dungeons (Amdaven), and various spots from one of the outside zones (Hamlin (Outside)). Make no mistake there is an incredible amount of work that needs to be done, but we’ve been moving at a relatively brisk pace. I’ll admit that crafting Hamlin has been a serious task. I seriously hope that Isliss will be a lot faster.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be rolling out some new screenshots of Hamlin (Outside) and maybe even a video montage of some of the new areas if we can manage it. We hope you guys like the progress we’re making. Until next time!